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Zadie Smith. The four main characters in her social comedy NW come from a council estate in North LondonDavid Levenson/Getty Images

Audio serial

Last updated at 9:00PM, June 2 2013

As Zadie Smith’s NW comes out in paperback, we offer Times readers an exclusive serial of audio extracts. Click the tab to hear the seven instalments. See if you agree with Helen Dunmore’s verdict below...

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty was described by its author as an
“homage” to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. The
writing revealed a formidable, even forensic literary intelligence, able to
strip down a great novel and rebuild it to ride the roads of the 21st
century. The presiding genius of her new novel, NW, is more obliquely
referenced, present in tone and style rather than outright plot line.

Michael Cunningham has already drawn on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
for The Hours, but Mrs Dalloway is inexhaustible. Smith takes
from it the sense of London’s topography as a character in itself,